Monthly Archives: July 2015

As we have weekly planned for the morning and evening classes; we started this week with presentations. The Warwick volunteers made four presentations on different topics. Ms. Fiona represented the education system of the United Kingdom. She explained very well about the schools functioning and University Education as well. Mr. Matt represented the Political and Economic system, Ms. Puja and Ms. Carli presented the Society and Culture of the United Kingdom. All presentations were very creative and informative as well. They used pictures and explained them very well. We got lots of ideas to assign the presentation for our teachers and students as well.

We assigned some topics to the teachers such as; Mr. Ramesh made his on Indian History, Zamaluddin made his on the Indian political system, Washim made it on the Indian Education system, Ms. Ritu on Indian culture and Ms. Sangeeta on Indian society. They all tried very well to make the presentations creative and informative as they learnt from the Warwick volunteers presentations. We found lots of similarities between the United Kingdom and India on each topic.

We decided to give some easy topics to our students as well. We chose some topics for them such as village life, monsoon crops, village festivals, local governing bodies and explanations of their schools. First, teachers presented their presentation in front of the students and then assigned them the above mentioned topics. We gave the topics VI to IX class students in groups. We made sure each group had a student from all classes and each group made presentations on their assigned topic. We gave them lots of ideas to collect the information for their presentation topics. We found they tried very hard and were looking very happy with their presentations because they learnt new things. They were very excited for the presentation and explained them very well. Hence, we are trying to teach some more creative things along with their school curriculum.

The second week started with the revision of punctuations and speech marks. We asked the teachers to make some sentences of conversation using the speech marks and punctuations and we found the teachers understood it very well. The next day we started the class by explaining apostrophe’s. The Warwick volunteers taught the teachers how to use the apostrophe’s to join two words and how the pronunciation of the words changes as we use apostrophe’s. We asked the teachers to write some joining words using the apostrophe’s such as (do not makes don’t etc.) They taught possessive apostrophe’s (shows something belongs to something else) e.g. ‘The car belonging to Madan.’ (Madan’s car). The teachers learnt how to use the apostrophe’s with singular and plural nouns how as well as using irregular plurals.

We found out some new ideas for increasing the vocabulary of teachers and students such as the use of the letters from the word PLANETS to make some more new words – we made 70 words! Hence, we are doing this exercise with the teachers and students as well on a daily basis, using different words.

On Wednesday we moved to a brand new centre in Alampur Village. It has more space than the older one and more weather protection.

On Friday we decided to do some art activities with the students and taught the teachers how to write formal and informal letters. They learnt the basics of letters and we taught them how to use computers to write their letters.

As I explained in my last blog about the morning classes planning; we started our morning teachers training with a brief introduction. It was really wonderful to know about the studies of the volunteers: Carli is doing PhD in Sociology, Puja is studying Sociology as well, Fiona is studying Childhood Education and Society and Matt is studying Economics. The Laksh teachers introduced themselves along with their study.

We started the teachers training with the introduction of punctuation. The Warwick volunteers introduced the punctuation mark like .( full stop), ! ( exclamation mark), ? ( question mark) and , ( comma). They asked the teachers, “How do we use the punctuation marks in the sentences?”

I was really happy to know that the Laksh teachers were answering well and they know a lot about punctuation, except a few. They wrote some paragraphs without using punctuation and asked the teachers to rewrite the paragraph using appropriate punctuation. The Laksh teachers did well and we practised a lot using different ways. We asked the teachers to write a paragraph about themselves and write their daily routine using all the punctuation.

They taught speech marks as well in the same week. The teachers are finding it hard to use the speech marks, so we decided to practice a lot by using the speech marks. We planned an art activity for Friday fun day, so we cut some shapes like circles, triangles, squares and rectangles and made a human body using these shapes. It was quite funny to do that! Basically, the whole idea behind the art activity was that we wanted to introduce about the shapes and their sides but the circle doesn’t have sides. Unfortunately, we couldn’t do that with the evening classes due to the rain, but we will definitely do it next Friday along with the next planning which we have already planned for everyday.

We discussed about evening classes and decided to start the classes with vocabulary. We made four boxes and asked the students to write the difficult words on flash cards with their Hindi meaning and put them into the box which we already made for each centre. We are collecting the new words everyday and we will play word games with the students any time and we are trying to increase their vocabulary. The Laksh teachers make the lesson planning for evening classes as they have allotted the classes. They taught the school curriculum along with the word meaning. We have decided to teach them some general knowledge alongside their curriculum. After the two hour classes we teach them about the Monsoon season and trees of our surrounding. We are trying to increase their knowledge using the different techniques.

As you know The University of Warwick from the UK is working with the Laksh Foundation, a student volunteering program. The University sends students to the Laksh Foundation every year to help the teachers in English and Maths. This year we are having twelve student volunteers in three batches. Each batch has four students that help the teachers and students as well. Every batch is going to stay with the Laksh Foundation for four weeks. There are eleven local teachers working with Laksh. In the morning we organise teacher training classes and lesson plan for the evening.

On 6th of July, 2015 we met four wonderful people it was first batch of the Warwick Volunteers. As you know we are eagerly waiting to meet Mr.Matt, Ms. Fiona, Ms. Puja and Ms. Carli. They arrived here at lunch time. After a delicious lunch they visited the Laksh tutorial centres to say hello to the students and teachers as well. Laksh works with four villages; Manger Village, Silakari Village, Dhauj Village and Alampur Village. They were really happy to visit the centres and saw the students as well. During the dinner we had a discussion about the morning teachers training class and decided to start the class with a brief introduction from the volunteers and teachers. They decided to teach punctuation for the teachers and work on the lesson planning for evening classes as well.